Although if anyone would have found something unconstitutionally arbitrary about that requirement, he probably would have been the guy. Most of the really monumental civil rights figures had died before I was born, and most of the rest had left public life by the time I was old enough to know what the civil rights era meant, in anything more than broad strokes. John Lewis was in office then, and I suppose Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson could be counted. Marshall had served his 24 years on the nation's highest court before Barack Obama had passed the bar. Of the twentieth century's civil rights titans, he was the last---du Bois and Garvey had passed on, Paul Robeson was living in Moscow, Malcolm X already assassinated when he joined the Court; Martin Luther King was dead six months later---unless one counts Rosa Parks.
The man who won Brown v. Board. First black Justice of the Supreme Court. He had other accomplishments---many---but somehow it feels they would only dilute his major triumphs.
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